Our cover feature in November’s issue #161 is
dedicated to 125 years of H. P. Lovecraft. The scribe from Providence got a lot
of bad press this month, what with the World Fantasy Award statuette
controversy – his visage (as designed by Gahan Wilson) has been removed from
this prestigious award after four decades due to his privately expressed views
of race. Still, regardless of those, the continuing and ever-growing influence of
this author’s prose cannot be over-estimated. That is why seven important writers,
scholars and editors are providing their own Rue Morgue exclusive answers to the same question: “What makes
Lovecraft still relevant today and even far more popular than back in his day?”

1. Thomas
Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti is probably the most faithful successor
of Lovecraftian bleak philosophy, which he further developed together with a
style and themes all his own. His two long out of print collections came out
this fall from Penguin (Songs of a Dead
Dreamer and Grimscribe): see our December’s issue #162.

I think there are a number
of explanations for Lovecraft’s continued relevance and popularity, and they’re
all quite glaring. A good many people are enamored of Lovecraft’s imagination,
particularly when it comes to the monsters he created. These entities make for
entertaining comic books, video games, role-playing games, and all kinds of
amusement of that sort. Then there are people who admire Lovecraft less for
these qualities than for his vision of what the universe and human life are all
about. Such persons are fewer and probably always will be. The reason for this
can best be traced to the fact that Lovecraft’s vision is not supportive or the
commonplace doctrines of human values. Even those who favor Lovecraft’s imagination,
particularly as it fabricated monsters of various kinds, do not share his
existential views. Another class of Lovecraft fan may be attached to the
character of the man himself as a rather freakish type of being whose
obsessions they find enchanting as recorded in his letters. There may, of
course, be some crossover between these groups. While Lovecraft is obviously
more popular and enduring than most of the other horror writers of his time, it
seems unlikely that he will ever mean very much for very many people.

He had other qualities that
made him an attractive figure in a normal sense. Outside of psychopaths and
some indefinite number of genuinely despicable persons, one doesn’t often
confront someone who doesn’t have a measure of congenial features. Lovecraft
was by no means loathsome. He was incredibly sensitive to what was loathsome
about humanity and human existence, but all the best people are sensitive in
exactly this way. All the same, he had to partake of a degree of insensitivity
or he wouldn’t have been able to tolerate being alive. One has to be a clod to
some extent, if not a psychopath or a genuinely despicable person, to maintain
a sufficient degree of vitality. But seldom or never did Lovecraft wholly
deviate from what made him a model horror writer who saw life in sheer
awfulness and made this perception the basis of who he was.

2. S. T.
Joshi

S. T. Joshi is the most eminent and devoted scholar of
the weird tale in general, and of Lovecraft in particular; his contribution to understanding
of this author through the dozens of books which he wrote and edited cannot be
overemphasized. His I Am Providence: The
Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft is an unsurpassable critical biography.

I think Lovecraft’s stories
speak to us in ways that those of his contemporaries by and large do not.
Although his stories are, in some particulars, clearly rooted in the culture
(intellectual, social, even political and economic) of the 1920s and 1930s,
they also possess a timeless quality that transcends their era. Lovecraft
addresses such questions as: the role of humanity in the vast cosmos-at-large;
questions of identity (what is it to be human? what is the difference—if
any—between the “human” and the “monstrous”?) and alienation from oneself and
one’s fellows; and the role of history and topography upon human life. There is
a depth and richness to Lovecraft’s work that is lacking in that of many of his
contemporaries, especially in the pulp realm.

The proliferation of “Lovecraftian”
anthologies is a slightly different matter. Certainly, the fact that Lovecraft
permitted others to contribute to and add to his “Cthulhu Mythos” (although, in
reality, there was no way he could have prevented anyone from doing so) during
his own lifetime have given others the license to do the same. But this
wouldn’t have been possible if the Cthulhu Mythos didn’t allow for nearly
unlimited expansion and elaboration—in ways that might have surprised Lovecraft
himself.

Currently what we’re seeing
is a kind of snowball effect, where one anthology seems to lead to others, and
still others. There may be a danger of oversaturation, especially if the
resulting work is of low quality. But in my mind the neo-Lovecraftian work of
the past 30 or 40 years has been remarkably high in quality, at least when
written by professionals knowledgeable in the basic thrust of Lovecraft’s work.
I like to think that the advance of scholarship during that time—which
clarified many myths about Lovecraft and his writing and showed that the interpretations
of such of his disciples as August Derleth were highly erroneous—has had
something to do with this increase in overall quality. Now that we know that
Lovecraft was not writing just stories about outlandish monsters, but had a
definite philosophy—the philosophy of “cosmic indifferentism”—that he sought to
embody in his stories, other writers have followed suit and elaborated upon
this philosophy, rather than merely writing one more story about a “god” or “forbidden
book” or something of the sort. The Cthulhu Mythos was to be “background-material”
for stories that meant something to the author; it could therefore allow
authors to express their own worldview within the context of this invented
mythology.

Lovecraft's fiction is
remarkable for being both “timeless” and deeply rooted in the time and place he
lived in. The more I read his fiction—and the more I learn about his life--the
more integrated his life, work, and thought seem to become. It is not merely
that, as a New Englander, he wrote profoundly about the history and topography
of New England. It is that his entire outlook—the “cosmic” perspective; a deep
sense of the fragilty of human life; an awareness of the corrupting influence
of technology and mechanisation on human affairs; a sensitivity to the
psychological effects of terror--is infused in every story he wrote.
Lovecraft's work is a product of the 1920s and 1930s--but it is also a gift for
all humanity.

3. Jeffrey
Andrew Weinstock

Jeffrey A. Weinstock is a scholar with significant contribution
to Lovecraftian studies, with two essays on this author in forthcoming academic
publications (Adapting Frankenstein
and The Lovecraftian Poe). He is
co-editor, with Carl Sederholm, of The
Age of Lovecraft, a scholarly collection coming in 2016 from University of
Minnesota Press and has also edited three volumes of Lovecraft's fiction for
Barnes & Noble.

Lovecraft's popularity
today is what I would refer to as “overdetermined” – that is, it is the product
of multiple lines of converging forces. Foremost among these, however, is
likely the concerted efforts of a group of admirers to publish and promote his
works. Arkham House was founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei in 1939 to
preserve Lovecraft's fiction. Few other authors, however deserving, have
enjoyed similar efforts to ensure the perpetuation of their legacies.

Connected to this as well
was Lovecraft's monumental correspondence and his encouragement of other
authors that helped to establish the “Lovecraft circle.” As Poe once quipped, “to
be appreciated you must be read” and together the Lovecraft circle and Arkham
House ensured that Lovecraft continued to be read. His works found their
ways into the hands of many influential contemporary makers of popular culture
– among them Neil Gaiman, Guillermo del Toro, John Carpenter, and China
Miéville – who have, in turn, created their own Lovecraftian works.

Lovecraft's anti-Humanist
cosmicism is particularly appealing to contemporary posthumanist scholars
invested in challenging models of thinking the human that have lead to
environmental despoilation and system abuse of animals and other human beings.

4. Ellen
Datlow

Ellen Datlow is today's most awarded editor in the
field of horror, responsible, among other things, for Lovecraftian anthologies Lovecraft Unbound, Lovecraft’s Monsters and upcoming Children of Lovecraft (2016).

Lovecraft's influence on
the field of horror has been enormous. During his lifetime and soon after, a
whole sub-genre developed of what today we would call fan fiction. Writers
among his circle of friends and acquaintances used his mythos to emulate and/or
expand upon his work. Some of the resulting pieces of fiction were pastiches,
some was more ambitious, more artful. In 1981 Chaosium Press released the
roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu, and the original game, its playbook,
and its offshoots and anthologies are still being published.

Scholars have been
dissecting his work and his personal life for decades and I think their
obsessions have helped keep his work alive.

The new generation of
writers “playing” in his playground are doing very different things. The best
have removed many of the trappings, bringing a freshness to the core elements
of Mythos fiction.

But the why of it? More
difficult to analyze: Perhaps because his vision of cosmic horror and of the
existence of or return of Elder Gods that control human destiny is creepy and
effective and has always been so, even though his prose was often clumsy and
overblown.

5. Brian
Hodge

Brian Hodge is among the most notable guests in recent
Lovecraftian anthologies and some of his stories, like “The Same Deep Waters as
You”, are among the best examples of HPL's concepts updated and upgraded with
quality and style.

What
Lovecraft is best known for, and what’s come to bear his name as an adjective,
is just a subset of his total body of work. It’s important to note how much
Lovecraft’s continued prominence is the result of factors that go beyond the
merits of his work.

He open-sourced the mythology and happily invited other
writers to come play in his yard. And it’s a big yard. That didn’t just spread
his influence in his own lifetime. It lent the whole mythology an expansive,
multigenerational momentum. So through that sense of play and camaraderie,
creative generosity and just having fun, he unwittingly launched a project that
hit a critical mass and took on a life of its own.

But there was no forgetting where it came from. None
of that could’ve mattered if Lovecraft himself hadn’t delivered the goods. And
he did. It wouldn’t have worked if the canvas he set up wasn’t broad enough to
hold other writers’ visions. But it was. It wasn’t world-building he did. It
was universe-building.

In the last few years,
reams of commentary have been devoted to the obvious go-to here: Lovecraft’s
psychological quirks in general and his racism in particular. I can't add to
that. But the timing, that's a factor I find interesting, and less remarked
upon.

For me, he was working in
this ideal window of time. He was a contemporary of physicists like Einstein
and Max Planck and Niels Bohr. His work often taps into that zeitgeist of the
frontiers of science being radically expanded, and the nature of reality being
plumbed at a much deeper level, where things get very strange. At the same time,
the world was a bigger, more disconnected place. There were no interstate
highways. Aviation was barely underway. Global population was less than a third
of today’s. No camera phones, no satellites, no TV with a 24-hour news cycle.
The more remote locales he uses feel genuinely isolated and hard to get to.
They’re places where superstitions die hard. They feel capable of containing
weird events without them drawing much wider attention, with plenty of time to
congeal into area folklore. I love how he stirs all this together.

6. Charles
Stross

Charles Stross is a British writer who took up Lovecraft's new world of Gods and Monsters and made
something recogizably his own through a series of novels about “The Laundry”, a
secret government agency for battling occult threats to mankind. The latest is The Annihilation Score (2015).

Lovecraft's writing career
stretched over more than 30 years, and like any human being his preoccupations
and outlook changed over time. When we look back at him it's with history's foreshortening
telephoto lens: we see it all superimposed as if it all happened at once. What
we can say for sure is: Lovecraft straddled the high gothic of the Victorian
era and the uneasy birth of the modern in the early 20th century. He felt born
out of his time, living in a fallen, debased age — indeed, we would today
characterise him as an early victim of future shock.

Lovecraft's relevance, for
me, goes back to one particular story I wrote: “A Colder War”. The premise of
ACW was that “At the Mountains of Madness” was a true and accurate historical
account: what, then, would have ensued during the 1940s through to the 1980s,
with the second world war and then the cold war in full effect?
Lovecraft's nightmares have to some extent faded due to over-exposure in the
spotlight of public awareness: so I used them as stand-ins for nuclear weapons,
in an attempt to put the fear of annihilation back into the mythos. It works,
but too well — ACW is a very bleak novelette, and any attempt to write
something in that mode at greater length would be too depressing.

However, I wanted to do
something involving secret histories, and spies, and Lovecraftian nightmares.
And I had an inkling that adding situational humour — a protagonist for one
sort of story who's fallen into a very different one and keeps rubbing up
against the rough edges the wrong way -- would take the edge off the darkness.
Both horror and humour are flavours you can add to any other type of fictional
narrative, and it turns out that they work well together: if anything, a dose
of edgy humour sharpens the edge of the abyss.

7. Gemma
Files

Gemma Files is a writer whose stories are commonly
among the very best in any recent Lovecraftian anthology. See RM#161 for a
feature on her first novel called Experimental
Film.

For me, there’s no other
formative horror author—someone almost universally acknowledged as being a
backbone part of the horror culture “canon”—who so typifies the main challenge
of this most problematic of genres the way that H.P. Lovecraft does. And that’s
because horror really revolves around the idea of “the Other,” which means it
revolves inherently around the idea of “othering”...of implying, or even
stating outright, that a everything/one sharing a certain combination of
qualities is somehow innately negative, alien, disgusting, frightening,
unnatural, horrible.

The symbological shorthand
used in horror very easily slides from universality to specificity and back out
again, so that what seems like a very personal fear—in Lovecraft, for example,
his revulsion at the thought of eating seafood—can, if probed deeply enough,
reveal facets that readers might end up sharing. So maybe you love calimari and
shrimp and a well-cooked salmon steak, but you also have to agree that the
ocean in general is spooky-ass place, a vast, dark unknown where nothing that
can’t breathe water can survive, full of things which glow and bite and don’t
have nearly enough bones for comfort, things that are cold-blooded and gelid,
things that can prey on each other (and you!) in truly disgusting ways. Go
deeper still (ha ha), and you end up orbiting fear of darkness, fear of
limitless space, fear of death and dissolution, fear of drowning, fear of
transformation... all basic human fears. Nobody’s going to argue with those.

Where Lovecraft runs into
trouble, however, is when those universal human fears run up against equally
universal human prejudices, our general tendency (proven by history) to apply
the same standards to other human beings—to essentially move from saying “I
don’t like seafood because I personally find it creepy” to “I don’t like Jewish
people, or QUILTBAG people, or people of any type of colour/culture beyond my
own because I find them creepy, and the reason I have that reaction is
that if you peel things back far enough you’ll soon discover they’re not
actually people at all, the same way the citizens of Innsmouth are
actually upright fish wearing not particularly well-fitting human-masks.”

Which is disgusting,
obviously, and our immediate reaction is to want to say “oh well, fuck
Lovecraft, let’s just get rid of him and everything he wrote, and everything
will be okay from then on.” But the lesson of Lovecraft is that no matter how
extreme his prejudices are, they’re far less the exception than the rule, and
that only by recognizing how innately racism, sexism, homophobia, etcetera form
the constant background radiation of everybody’s lives do we have any hope of
defusing that cycle. That no matter what we do or how hard we try to reject
these social constructions which exclude some of us from “full humanity,” the
true cosmic horror of it all is that each of us has a switch inside that’s
constantly flicking back and forth, recognizing that exclusion and being
exclusive in turn, setting boundaries and policing them, making our own
personal standards for what qualifies as human. That if we only scratch
ourselves hard enough, we will always find the instinct to say: “You’re not
like me, and that makes you somehow wrong.”

This is a basic human
impulse, the impulse to literally dehumanize others, and it doesn’t go away
just because you cut Lovecraft out of the canon, any more than Barack Obama
winning two terms somehow means racism is “over,” so shut the fuck about it. It
continues whether we choose to examine it or not, a grinding, chronic universal
pain that has to be defused again and again. And if we choose to make Lovecraft
into nothing more than a convenient scapegoat for our collective white/cissexual/heterosexual/able-bodied
guilt, we risk not realizing that he remains only the tip of that particular
iceberg. We have to keep on checking ourselves in order to stay honest, and
having Lovecraft around making us look bad provides a very handy reminder of
that fact.

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"Can you look around this world and believe in goodness of a god who rules it?! Famine, pestilence, slaughter, disease and death... They rule this world. If a god of love and life ever did exist, he's long since dead. Someone... Something... rules in his place..."-Prince Prospero-

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Основни подаци о мени

Dejan Ognjanovic was born in Nis, Serbia, in 1973. He worked as a TA in American Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, Nis (1999-2009). Got his MA in 2009 ('Gothic Motifs in the Works of E. A. Poe') and his PhD in 2012 ('Historical Poetics of Horror Genre in Anglo-American Literature'). Writes book and film reviews and articles for Rue Morgue magazine. In Serbia he has published 9 books: novels In Vivo (2003) and The Seducer (2014); three studies: Faustian Screen: The Devil in Cinema (2006), In the Hills, the Horrors: Serbian Horror Film (2007) and Poetics of Horror (2014), a collection of essays A Study in Terror (2008) and a book of interviews More than Truth (2017); and he edited H. P. Lovecraft's best stories (Nekronomikon, 2008.) and co-edited The New Frames (2008), on Serbian cinema. His essays were published in the books edited by Steven Schneider: 100 European Horror Films, 501 Movie Directors, 101 Horror / SF / Gangster / War Movies You Must See Before You Die, and also in Speaking of Monsters (2012) and Digital Nightmares (2015). He is an editor at Orfelin Publishing (Novi Sad, Serbia). His reviews in English can be found at Beyond Hollywood, Unrated and Quiet Earth.